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  First published as a World’s Classics paperback 1995

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  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  Laclos, Choderlos de, 1741–1803.

  [Liaisons dangereuses. English]

  Les liaisons dangereuses/Pierre Choderlos de Laclos; translated

  and edited by Douglas Parmée; introduction by David Coward.

  p. cm.—(Oxford world’s classics)

  France—Social life and customs—18th century—Fiction. 2. Aristocracy (Social

  class)—France—Fiction. 3. Man-woman relationships—

  France—Fiction. I. Parmée, Douglas. II. Title. III. Series.

  PQ1993.L22L53 1995 843’.6—dc20 94-30781

  ISBN–13: 978–0–19–283867–4

  ISBN–10: 0–19–283867–9

  13

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  OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS

  Les Liaisons dangereuses

  PIERRE CHODERLOS DE LACLOS

  Translated and edited by

  DOUGLAS PARMÉE

  Introduction by

  DAVID COWARD

  OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS

  LES LIAISONS DANGEREUSES

  PIERRE-AMBROISE-FRANÇOIS CHODERLOS DE LACLOS, born at Amiens in 1741, trained as an artillery officer at the military school at La Fère. His hopes of active service were frustrated in 1763 by the Treaty which ended the Seven Years War. For twenty-five years he was a peacetime soldier in garrison towns in the French provinces where, as was expected of army officers, he socialized and dabbled in literature. His only novel, Les Liaisons dangereuses, was begun during a posting to Besançon in 1778 and completed in Paris by the end of 1781. The scandal which greeted its publication in 1782 led his superiors to banish him to La Rochelle. In 1788 Laclos became secretary to the Duke of Orléans and acquired an undeserved reputation as a sinister political schemer. After the collapse of the ancien règime in 1789, he accompanied the Duke to London, returning to Paris in June 1790 when he joined the Jacobin Club and soon emerged as one of its leading spokesmen. A convinced but moderate revolutionary, he played a crucial role in preparing the French defences for the battle of Valmy in 1792. But as the political climate deteriorated, he was arrested more than once and narrowly avoided the guillotine in 1794. On his release, he devoted himself to his family but remained sufficiently in touch with events to play a part in the coup of 18 Brumaire (1799) which brought Napoleon to power. He died at Taranto in 1803 of fever and exhaustion.

  DOUGLAS PARMÉE studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, the University of Bonn, and the Sorbonne. He later served in RAF Intelligence before returning to teach in Cambridge, where he was a Fellow and Director of Studies at Queens’ College. He now lives in Adelaide, South Australia. He has written widely on French Studies and is a prizewinning translator from French, German, and Italian.

  DAVID COWARD is Senior Fellow and Emeritus Professor of French Literature at the University of Leeds. He is the author of studies of Marivaux, Marguerite Duras, Marcel Pagnol, and Restif de la Bretonne. For Oxford World’s Classics, he has edited eight novels by Alexandre Dumas, including the whole of the Musketeer saga, and translated Dumas fils’s La Dame aux Camélias, two selections of Maupassant short stories, and Sade’s Misfortunes of Virtue and Other Early Tales. Winner of the 1996 Scott-Moncrieff prize for translation, he reviews regularly for the Times Literary Supplement.

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Note on French Texts

  Select Bibliography

  A Chronology of Choderlos de Laclos

  LES LIAISONS DANGEREUSES

  PART I

  PART II

  PART III

  PART IV

  Appendix

  Explanatory Notes

  INTRODUCTION

  A few days after the publication of Les Liaisons dangereuses in April 1782, Mme Riccoboni, a family friend and herself a novelist, administered a sharp rebuke to its author: ‘I am not surprised that a son of Monsieur de Choderlos should write well. Wit is hereditary in his family. But I cannot commend him for employing his talents, his invention and his elegant pen to furnish foreigners with so appalling a notion of the manners of his nation and of the taste of his compatriots.’ Berlin was shocked when Laclos’s novel was translated into German in 1783 and, greeting the appearance of Dangerous Connections (4 vols., priced 10s.) in London in 1784, the Monthly Review issued the predictable warning. Though ‘conducted with great art and skill’, the story is quite ‘diabolical’. Moreover,

  the pretence of ‘instruction’ is an insult to the understanding of the Public, as the work itself is a daring outrage on every law of virtue and decorum … The scenes of seduction and intrigue are laid open with such freedom, that for one who will be ‘instructed’ by the catastrophe, a thousand will be corrupted by the plot… Actions of so atrocious a nature as are here delineated, devised by cunning, attended in their for
mation by a contexture of dark and disguised villainies, will not admit of particular description. When we read them, it is not enough to say we are disgusted at such complicated crimes; but we are actually chilled with horror. For aught we know, such characters may exist as are here described, not only in France, where the scene of action is laid, but in other countries, whose religion and customs may be more favourable to religion and virtue. However, let them exist where they will, instead of being exposed to the eye of the Public, they should be consigned to that outer darkness to which they belong.

  But it was not only foreigners who were appalled. The first French reactions were equally fierce: ‘a tissue of horrors and infamies’, said the Mémoires secrets. ‘However poor an opinion you might have of society in general and of Parisian society in particular,’ observed the Baron de Grimm in the Correspondance littéraire, ‘I do not think it possible for a young person of the fair sex to encounter any connections as dangerous as a perusal of Les Liaisons dangereuses.’ A ‘diabolical’ novel exuding fumes of sulphur which outraged the moral majority could not fail to be a commercial success. The first printing of 2,000 copies sold out in the middle two weeks of April 1782. A second followed immediately and about fifteen pirated editions had appeared by the end of the year. ‘No novel of recent times’, wrote Grimm, ‘has enjoyed such spectacular success.’ Notoriety was heaped on its author, an obscure artillery officer who was suspected of being every whit as wicked as his book. Whether he had imagined such villainy, or (as was widely believed) had merely stitched together a roman à clef out of an authentic correspondence, was not the question: either way, the man was a ‘monster’. Marie-Antoinette ordered a copy but, before allowing it into her library, took the precaution of ensuring that neither the title nor the author’s name appeared on the binding. The Marquise de Coigny (hardly a model of propriety) is reported to have closed her doors to Laclos on the grounds that were she left alone with him she would be terrified. The anecdote is probably apocryphal but it fairly captures the general reaction of the public which felt it had been caught in the cold, fascinating stare of a reptile. Yet despite the scandal, Les Liaisons dangereuses continued to be reprinted at regular intervals without interference from the authorities. Laclos never reoffended: the sequel promised on the last page of the book did not materialize. Les Liaisons dangereuses was the first and only novel of one of the most enigmatic authors in French literature.

  Pierre-Ambroise-François Choderlos de Laclos was born at Amiens in 1741. His family had only recently been ennobled and, in the caste-ridden society of the ancien régime, occupied a lowly place in the aristocratic hierarchy. He was sent to military school and trained in an artillery regiment which not only offered the prospect of a technical career but was known to recruit from the bourgeoisie and petite noblesse: the more glamorous regiments were staffed almost exclusively by nobles having the requisite number of quarterings in their escutcheons. In 1762, at his own request, Sub-Lieutenant Laclos was attached to the new Brigade des Colonies then forming at La Rochelle to oppose the English in India and Canada. But Laclos’s hopes of seeing action abroad collapsed the following year when the Treaty of Paris ended both the Seven Years War and French imperial ambitions. Thwarted by the persistent peace, Laclos spent the next quartercentury kicking his heels in provincial garrison towns. His superiors regarded him as an able and conscientious officer of regular habits and he progressed slowly but steadily, but was not promoted beyond the rank of captain. Like many military men serving in a peacetime army stationed outside Paris, Laclos wrote a quantity of verse, most of it unremarkable except for an ‘Epistle to Margot’, published in 1770, which, when it circulated clandestinely in Paris in 1774, was read as a lampoon of Madame Du Barry, Louis XV’s mistress (see note to p. 375).

  Laclos was then approaching the end of a six-year posting in Grenoble. There, as was expected of officers stationed in provincial towns, he fraternized with local society. Little is known of his activities at this time—certainly there is no trace of a proto-Valmont at work—and he later wrote to his wife that he had left behind there no ‘true affections’, merely ‘agreeable acquaintances’. He spent his leaves in Paris, where he kept in touch with his family and gained a foothold in the literary world. He wrote a play, The Matron, which he probably destroyed, and in 1777 provided the libretto for Ernestine, an opera based on a novel by Mme Riccoboni, which closed after one, quite disastrous performance. Laclos was then stationed at Besançon and it was there that he began writing Les Liaisons dangereuses in 1778.

  The following year, he was seconded to the service of the Marquis de Montalembert who had been given the task of fortifying the Île d’Aix, off La Rochelle, where the French, who had sided with the insurgents against the British in the American War of Independence, saw the threat of a landing by the Royal Navy. Montalembert left Laclos—who would have much preferred the chance of seeing action in America—to supervise the work which was successfully tested by French guns in 1781, but not by the English fleet which never came. In off-duty hours and during spells of leave in Paris, he continued working at his novel and it was there that he completed it. When the scandal broke in April 1782, Laclos’s superiors took the view that he had brought the army into disrepute and, to limit the damage, ordered him out of the limelight and back to the Atlantic coast. At La Rochelle he met Marie-Soulange Duperré, the daughter of a well-to-do official. At a time when girls were normally married by the age of 18, Marie-Soulange was a spinster of 23. When she became pregnant, Laclos, instead of deserting her as any selfrespecting libertine owed it to his honour to do, asked for her hand. But he was rejected by the family who had no wish to be connected with a man of such unsavoury reputation. Laclos persisted, however, and he and Marie-Soulange were married in 1786. They later had two other children and lived very happily together.

  Meanwhile, Laclos had not abandoned his pen which he devoted to a number of causes, some of which surprise by their eccentricity. In 1783 he began the first of three very modern essays on the education of women, none of which he completed. Rousseau had argued that the native goodness of natural man had been corrupted by society. Laclos, who shared his contemporaries’ admiration for the author of La Nouvelle Héloïse, said as much of natural woman who had been enslaved by a society dominated by men. As long as women remain slaves, they cannot be educated. And until such time as there occurs ‘a great revolution’, which only women can bring about, they will remain in ignorance and bondage. The following year, he wrote a rambling review of Fanny Burney’s Cecilia. While other critics expressed reservations and drew attention to its cosily happy ending, Laclos commended the book for its faithfulness to life, its defence of sentiment, and its moral purity. In 1786 he published an ill-advised attack on Vauban, then regarded in official military circles as the presiding genius of France’s defensive strategy. Laclos pointed out that the forts which Vauban had built on France’s north-eastern frontier were vulnerable, rather as de Gaulle in 1925 cast doubt on the effectiveness of the Maginot Line. For his impertinence, he was again banished to the provinces. There he devised a rather earnest scheme for numbering the streets of Paris which he submitted to the Journal de Paris, the first French daily newspaper.

  Laclos had been paid 1,600 livres for his novel and was now bringing up a family on his captain’s pay of 2,700. He still hoped to make his way in the army and in 1788 applied for a military attachment to the French embassy in Turkey. His application was unsuccessful, but later the same year he obtained leave to serve as secretary to the Duke of Orléans who, with an income of 3 millions, was the richest man in France. Laclos received a salary of 6,000 livres: it will be remembered that Cécile de Volanges would bring her husband 60,000 a year. Orléans, the king’s cousin, though weak and vacillating, carried the hopes of liberal opinion which would have wished him on the throne instead of Louis XVI. It was a view apparently shared by Laclos, though exactly what role he played in events remains unclear. But as time passed and public unrest gre
w, the ‘Machiavellian’ author of Les Liaisons dangereuses emerged as the sinister power behind Orléans who quickly came to be known as Philippe-Égalité, the people’s choice. When the women of Paris marched on Versailles in October, eye-witnesses swore that Laclos, scattering his master’s gold, had led the protest, wearing a dress. When tension mounted further, Philippe-Égalité removed himself to London, taking his secretary with him.

  In London, Laclos pushed the Orleanist cause harder than the Duke himself was prepared to do. His disillusionment with his indecisive employer increased after his return to France in July 1790 and, as a moderate, constitutional revolutionary, he gravitated towards the Jacobin Club which appreciated his talents and made him editor of its journal. By the summer of 1791 (when he retired from the army on a pension of 1,800 francs) he firmly believed that Louis XVI should abdicate and that Philippe-Égalité should rule as Regent. But he was compromised over the wording of the petition which led to the massacre of the Champ de Mars in July and subsequently withdrew from the Jacobins which by now had ceased to be a club of lawyers and had begun its long lurch into extremism. He lived quietly with his family, but kept an eye on events.

  After Louis XVI virtually decided the future of the monarchy by attempting to flee the country in June 1792, Laclos reemerged from the shadows and, protected now by Danton, was sent to Châlons-sur-Marne to organize French defences against the imminent arrival of the Prussians. His crucial role in Kellerman’s victory at Valmy in September 1792 was duly noted and he was redrafted into the army with the rank of Brigadier-General. He was appointed Chief of Staff to the War Minister and Commander-in-Chief of French forces in the Pyrenees where, for want of an enemy, he was unable to contribute further signal services to the Revolution. But the political mood of Paris was volatile and he was jailed in the spring of 1793 with a number of other Orleanist supporters. He was freed in May. Though placed under house arrest, he was allowed to conduct field tests of a new type of shell which he had invented. He was rearrested in November and remained in prison, narrowly escaping the guillotine, for thirteen months. When he was finally released in December 1794, his application to rejoin the army was rejected and for the next four years he lived modestly as a public functionary. Somehow, he managed to keep in touch with events and personalities and proved useful, in ways which remain obscure, in bringing about Napoleon’s coup d’état in November 1799. For services rendered, he was reinstated in the army and at last heard shots fired in anger in Germany and Italy in the second half of 1800, to the extent of having a horse killed under him. When peace was signed with Austria in February 1801, Laclos returned to Paris where he was given a number of postings, finally being sent, as a full General, to Italy where he died of dysentery, malaria, and exhaustion in September 1803.